Posted on 12/27/2004 2:34:25 PM PST by Ed Current
The most censored speech in the United States today is not flag-burning, pornography or the press. The worst censors are those who prohibit classroom criticism of the theory of evolution.
A Chinese scholar observed, "In China we can criticize Darwin but not the government. In America you can criticize the government but not Darwin."
Polls show that the vast majority of Americans reject the theory of evolution, as have great scientists such as William Thomas Kelvin and Louis Pasteur. But that does not stop an intolerant minority from trying to impose a belief in the ape-to-man theory on everyone else.
Local school boards have finally had enough of this tyranny. From Georgia to Pennsylvania to Ohio to Wisconsin to Kansas, school boards are finally moving toward allowing criticism of Darwin's theory.
The Darwinists have propped up their classroom dominance by the persistent use of frauds and flacks. The fraudulent pro-evolution embryo drawings of Ernst Haeckel littered schoolbooks for 100 years, and it took specific action by the Texas Board of Education to keep them out of current textbooks even after the New York Times exposed Haeckel's deception.
Many textbooks feature pictures of giraffes stretching their necks to feed high off of trees, but genetics and observed feeding habits disprove that as a basis for evolution of their long necks. Moreover, the striking beauty of the colored pattern on the giraffes illustrates that design, not merely usefulness, is what animates our world.
Continued censorship of criticism invites additional fraud, so evolution has suffered more embarrassments than any other scientific theory. The Piltdown man was a lie taught to schoolchildren for decades, even featured in the John Scopes Monkey Trial textbook, and only five years ago a dinosaur-bird fossil hoax was presented as true on the glossy pages of National Geographic.
If Darwinists want to teach that whales, which are mammals, evolved from black bears swimming with their mouths open, we should surely be entitled to criticize that. Yet school libraries have refused to accept books critical of evolution, even when written by college professors.
Responding to the majority of their constituents, Georgia's Cobb County recently authorized a textbook disclaimer saying "Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered."
The American Civil Liberties Union claims this is unconstitutional and is seeking out supremacist judges to order classroom curricula to continue the censorship and forbid an open mind about evolution. If the theory of evolution were well supported, there would be no reason to oppose open debate about scientific claims.
In December 2004, a world-famous champion of atheism, Antony Flew, announced his conversion to acceptance of intelligent design underlying our world. The Dallas Morning News observed, "If the scientific data are compelling enough to cause an atheist academic of Flew's reputation to recant most of his life's work, why shouldn't Texas schoolchildren be taught the controversy?"
At 81, Flew can speak out because he is now free from the peer pressure that silences younger colleagues who fear loss of jobs, funding, or even dreams of winning a Nobel Prize. Evolution critics Fred Hoyle and Raymond Damadian were unjustly denied Nobel Prizes and their work was instead recognized by awards to less-deserving others.
Darwinists know they cannot persuade skeptical adults, so they try to capture impressionable schoolchildren. At our expense and against our wishes, children are taught that the world exists only for what is useful, not by design.
To typical schoolchildren full of wonder, we live in a world best described as a marvelous work of art. The snowflakes that grace us at Christmastime typify the artistic beauty that bestows joy on all ages but, like an acid, evolution corrodes this inborn appreciation of beauty and falsely trains children to view themselves as mere animals no more worthy than dogs or cats.
There is a strong correlation between belief in natural selection and liberal views on government control, pornography, prayer in schools, abortion, gun control, economic freedom, and even animal rights. For the most part, the schools in the blue states carried in the 2004 presidential election by U.S. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., are strongly pro-evolution, while the red states carried by President George W. Bush allow debate and dissent.
It should surprise no one that the United States, land of the free and home of the brave, has the lowest percentage of evolution believers in the world. The highest percentage lived in the former East Germany.
The U.S. Senate of former Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., quietly slipped a provision into the No Child Left Behind Act that requires, by the 2007-2008 school year, science testing by grade 5. That gives censors the authority to force 10-year-olds to believe and defend evolution.
It is long past time for parents to realize they have the right and duty to protect their children from the intolerant evolutionists. Hooray for courageous school boards that are finally rejecting censorship and allowing debate.
The genetic code is a mechanism to translate nucleic acid information (DNA and/or RNA) into protein.
Since you are very knowledgable about evolution perhaps you can explain the above apparently tautological statement to me.
Cordially,
You had an online debate with Phillip Johnson??? When did that happen???
| Einstein was a Creationist. >>Bullsh*t! >>Einstein was an empiricist above all. "Creationism" didn't exist during his lifetime I happen to know a man who actually worked with Einstein at one point in his life... and spoke with him frequently about God. Einstein WAS a creationist. |
Wow, what an ignorant, incorrect statement. Where exactly did you "learn" this bit of disinformation? From a creationist source, right? They're famous for that sort of lie.
So biologists "really have no idea" about whale evolution, you say? Here are just a few of the many things you're extremely ignorant of on this topic:
(From Plagiarized Errors and Molecular Genetics)That's just a quick layman-level overview of *one* of the many ways that whale evolution has been verified. For more technical examinations along several independent lines of evidence, see for example:.
A particularly impressive example of shared retroposons has recently been reported linking cetaceans (whales, dolphins and porpoises) to ruminants and hippopotamuses, and it is instructive to consider this example in some detail. Cetaceans are sea-living animals that bear important similarities to land-living mammals; in particular, the females have mammary glands and nurse their young. Scientists studying mammalian anatomy and physiology have demonstrated greatest similarities between cetaceans and the mammalian group known as artiodactyls (even-toed ungulates) including cows, sheep, camels and pigs. These observations have led to the evolutionist view that whales evolved from a four-legged artiodactyl ancestor that lived on land. Creationists have capitalized on the obvious differences between the familiar artiodactyls and whales, and have ridiculed the idea that whales could have had four-legged land-living ancestors. Creationists who claim that cetaceans did not arise from four-legged land mammals must ignore or somehow dismiss the fossil evidence of apparent whale ancestors looking exactly like one would predict for transitional species between land mammals and whales--with diminutive legs and with ear structures intermediate between those of modern artiodactyls and cetaceans (Nature 368:844,1994; Science 263: 210, 1994). (A discussion of fossil ancestral whale species with references may be found at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional/part2b.html#ceta) Creationists must also ignore or dismiss the evidence showing the great similarity between cetacean and artiodactyl gene sequences (Molecular Biology & Evolution 11:357, 1994; ibid 13: 954, 1996; Gatesy et al, Systematic Biology 48:6, 1999).
Recently retroposon evidence has solidified the evolutionary relationship between whales and artiodactyls. Shimamura et al. (Nature 388:666, 1997; Mol Biol Evol 16: 1046, 1999; see also Lum et al., Mol Biol Evol 17:1417, 2000; Nikaido and Okada, Mamm Genome 11:1123, 2000) studied SINE sequences that are highly reduplicated in the DNA of all cetacean species examined. These SINES were also found to be present in the DNA of ruminants (including cows and sheep) but not in DNA of camels and pigs or more distantly related mammals such as horse, elephant, cat, human or kangaroo. These SINES apparently originated in a specific branch of ancestral artiodactyls after this branch diverged from camels, pigs and other mammals, but before the divergence of the lines leading to modern cetaceans, hippopotamus and ruminants. (See Figure 5.) In support of this scenario, Shimamura et al. identified two specific insertions of these SINES in whale DNA (insertions B and C in Figure 5) and showed that in DNA of hippopotamus, cow and sheep these same two sites contained the SINES; but in camel and pig DNA the same sites were "empty" of insertions. More recently, hippopotamus has been identified as the closest living terrestrial relative of cetaceans since hippos and whales share retroposon insertions (illustrated by D and E in Figure 5) that are not found in any other artiodactyls (Nikaido et al, PNAS 96:10261, 1999). The close hippo-whale relationship is consistent with previously reported sequence similarity comparisons (Gatesy, Mol Biol Evol 14:537, 1997) and with recent fossil finds (Gingerich et al., Science 293:2239, 2001; Thewissen et al., Nature 413:277, 2001) that resolve earlier paleontological conflicts with the close whale-hippo relationship. (Some readers have wondered: if ruminants are more closely related to whales than to pigs and camels, why are ruminants anatomically more similar to pigs and camels than they are to whales? Apparently this results from the fact that ruminants, pigs and camels changed relatively little since their last common ancestor, while the cetacean lineage changed dramatically in adapting to an aquatic lifestyle, thereby obliterating many of the features -- like hooves, fur and hind legs -- that are shared between its close ruminant relatives and the more distantly related pigs and camels. This scenario illustrates the fact that the rapid evolutionary development of adaptations to a new niche can occur through key functional mutations, leaving the bulk of the DNA relatively unchanged. The particularly close relationship between whales and hippos is consistent with several shared adaptations to aquatic life, including use of underwater vocalizations for communication and the absence of hair and sebaceous glands.) Thus, retroposon evidence strongly supports the derivation of whales from a common ancestor of hippopotamus and ruminants, consistent with the evolutionary interpretation of fossils and overall DNA sequence similarities. Indeed, the logic of the evidence from shared SINEs is so powerful that SINEs may be the best available characters for deducing species relatedness (Shedlock and Okada, Bioessays 22:148, 2000), even if they are not perfect (Myamoto, Curr. Biology 9:R816, 1999).
Figure 5. Specific SINE insertions can act as "tracers" that illuminate phylogenetic relationships. This figure summarizes some of the data on SINEs found in living artiodactyls and shows how the shared insertions can be interpreted in relation to evolutionary branching. A specific SINE insertion event ("A" in the Figure) apparently occurred in a primitive common ancestor of pigs, ruminants, hippopotamus and cetaceans, since this insertion is present in these modern descendants of that common ancestor; but it is absent in camels, which split off from the other species before this SINE inserted. More recent insertions B and C are present only in ruminants, hippopotamus and cetaceans. Insertions D and E are shared only by hippopotamus and cetaceans, thereby identifying hippopotamus as the closest living relative of cetaceans (at least among the species examined in these studies). SINE insertions F and G occurred in the ruminant lineage after it diverged from the other species; and insertions H and I occurred after divergence of the cetacean lineage.
SINE Evolution, Missing Data, and the Origin of WhalesAnd much, much more.Evidence from Milk Casein Genes that Cetaceans are Close Relatives of Hippopotamid Artiodactyls
Analyses of mitochondrial genomes strongly support a hippopotamus±whale clade
A new Eocene archaeocete (Mammalia, Cetacea) from India and the time of origin of whales
Mysticete (Baleen Whale) Relationships Based upon the Sequence of the Common Cetacean DNA Satellite1
Eocene evolution of whale hearing
Novel Phylogeny of Whales Revisited but Not Revised
New Morphological Evidence for the Phylogeny of Artiodactyla, Cetacea, and Mesonychidae
So, when you say, "Scientists now theorize that it evolved from a hippo-like creature, though they really have no idea", I only have one question for you: Are you outright lying, or are you just monumentally ignorant (but still arrogant enough to spout off about something you actually know so little about)?
That's not a rhetorical question. Please respond.
Now run off and play with the other creationists, the evolutionary biologists are doing adult-type stuff that you apparently can't grasp, and have no real interest in learning about.
What *kind* of creationist?
Nothing I've read in his works or his writings indicates that he had much in common with the typical anti-evolutionist, "scientists are foolish and part of a God-hating conspiracy" creationists.
Furthermore, there are many people who could fairly be called *both* creationist *and* evolutionist. But those aren't the kind of folks we're talking about on these threads when we talk about the antics of "creationists".
| Creationists are those who believe in God. Evolutionists are those who don't. The fence straddlers don't know what to believe, so they attempt to bridge the gap between two mutually exclusive theories. |
Around 1992 or early 1993, in the talk.origins Usenet newsgroup. It took place over about a week of back-and-forth posts, until Johnson bailed out.
Unfortunately, I didn't save a copy, and the Google/DejaNews archives of newsgroups doesn't seem to carry anything from earlier than around mid-1993. I wish I could locate archives of those posts, along with other posts I made during that period, since those were my earliest months on the internet.
I don't have any of my own contemporaneous responses to Johnson, but the replies in the following thread from a few months later, begun when Johnson (yet again) posted a "farewell opus" to talk.origins, certainly match my own recollections of his behavior in those discussions: Au revoir (Phillip E Johnson)
You'll also note that Johnson employed the age-old creationist tactic of bailing out of a discussion with some minor variation on, "you evolutionists sure are meanies, too bad you never refuted any of my arguments, all you did was insult me, blah blah blah"...
The ability of the typical creationist to feign amnesia regarding all the times that evolutionists rebutted his claims with facts, arguments, evidence, scientific papers, etc. is truly astounding.
Darwin's "Creator" is not defined, and is left to the reader's imagination. "the Creator" to which Darwin refers is Nature, and it's laws of natural selection... which rejects intelligent design.
Did you miss my television debate with the late Steve Gould? Smoked him. How about Ed Current vs Eugenie Price? Maybe BibChr and Norm Geisler vs the entire biology department at MSU?
Then you're using these words in ways that almost no one else does. Do you do so out of ignorance of their meaning, or out of an attempt to mislead?
For example, Fred Hoyle is an an example of an atheist creationist (using "creationist" in the *usual* manner, not your own bizarre redefinition), and there are countless evolutionists (again, by the real-world definition and not yours) who believe in God, including many posters on these threads. In fact, the *majority* of American evolutionists are Christians.
So, do you want to continue to stamp your feet and insist on trying to bend reality to what you'd *like* to believe is true, or are you going to join the rest of us here in the real world and get a clue?
Did you miss my television debate with the late Steve Gould? Smoked him. How about Ed Current vs Eugenie Price? Maybe BibChr and Norm Geisler vs the entire biology department at MSU?
Are you really under the impression that you're adding anything to the thread by repeatedly behaving like an ass?
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